After a three day state of emergency and government shutdown, on Tuesday morning New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed a compromise budget bill ending the state shutdown that became an embarrassment for the outgoing governor when he was photographed lounging on a beach that had been closed to the public for the holiday weekend.
The New Jersey government shutdown and state of emergency entered its third day, as lawmakers failed to approve a budget for fiscal 2018.
Readers are familiar with the various microwave and laser arrays located at the real New York Stock Exchange in Mahwah, New Jersey, both of which we have written about in the past.
Microwave tower located next to the NYSE in Mahwah, NJ.
Standard and Poor's credit rating analysts for the state of New Jersey, David Hitchcock and John Sugden, apparently think that funding only half of your state's annual actuarially determined contributions is a bad thing...who knew? So, just to make sure we achieve crystal clarity here, S&P believes that adding to NJ's $66 billion pension underfunded liability, which would be much higher but for a ridiculous assumption the state makes in setting its return on assets at an artificially high rate of 7.65%, each and every year by contributing less to the fund than what is
After struggling to raise debt from third parties to repair crumbling infrastructure, the state of New Jersey has come up with a "clever" approach to fundraising that entails selling debt to their own insolvent pension funds...something we've dubbed the "Pension Ponzi Squared." Of course, because when everybody else shuns your debt for being too risky who better to sell it to than yourself?